According to their Conservative critics, David Cameron and George Osborne are
isolated and impervious to advice.

The summer drinks party season in Westminster has begun early this year. Maybe it’s the Diamond Jubilee spirit or the need to get it all over with before the Olympic lockdown in London. But, for whatever reason, we are already immersed in the rituals which bring journalists and politicians, together in such convivial circumstances as to produce some serious damage. Traditionally, at these festivities, pundits sidle up to politicians hoping that they can prod them into saying something indiscreet enough to be interesting, even if it is only unattributable “deep background”.

Well, I have to tell you that in Tory circles at the moment we have a rather different problem. There is no scope for wheedling solicitations, no waiting around for careless talk or the odd flicker of disloyalty. The risk is not going without any treacherous gossip, but of being killed in the stampede of discontented Conservatives propelling themselves at members of the commentariat in order to unload their frustration and rage. Nor is this simply the familiar gang of malcontents. That lot are almost beyond articulating their despair. No, this is a much wider phenomenon that extends from some of the brightest and best among the backbenchers right up to the Government front bench and the higher reaches of the party hierarchy, who are all singing the same refrain: they will not listen. The “they” of course being David Cameron and George Osborne who, it is alleged, have become so isolated, so self-referring, so distanced from anyone outside of their immediate, tiny circle that they are impervious to advice and deaf to argument.

What is worse, they have not concluded from the unforced errors of recent weeks that their own judgment is fallible and therefore in need of input from beyond the favoured clique. Instead they have been driven further and further into a defensive sulk. The Chancellor, one of my interlocutors informed me, has been so traumatised by the disastrous reception of his Budget that he has gone to ground and become more inaccessible than ever. (“He’s in the bunker now.”) The word I have heard repeated more than any other in these furious diatribes is “arrogant”. What exasperates the disaffected troops is not just the discounting of their views (which they believe would resonate with most people who might consider voting Conservative) but the refusal to engage with them at all: the insistence that any formula other than policy-by-focus-group must be quaintly risible and beneath contempt.

Of course it is true that the Tory party is addicted to internecine struggle: that even Margaret Thatcher – who was the quintessential conviction politician – had to deal with mutiny and factional infighting. I accept, too, that the Constraints of Coalition, to which so much blame is attached, are a very real factor in the dissatisfaction of Tory MPs who might have expected ministerial posts. And it is also true that it is the unhappy or the trouble-making who are most likely to seek the ear of a journalist. So in the interests of a fair hearing, I have solicited the opinions of some who are professedly loyal to the party leadership. They do not only – as you might expect – see the situation quite differently: they are utterly flabbergasted by the charge. Indeed, they seem to be living in a parallel universe in which the Chancellor and Prime Minister are infinitely receptive to contrary viewpoints, in which the doors of the highest offices are always open, in which no backbench MP, however lowly, is ever refused a hearing, etc, etc.

But this vision of beatific democracy in which everyone is entitled to his brief audience with the fount of power seems slightly to miss the point. Something in the description of such meetings has the ring of 10 minutes with the headmaster in which to make your complaint on behalf of the lower fourth. Surely the real point is that Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne are not prepared to countenance constructive debate or even to answer questions about their own basic objectives and principles. They can scarcely object (although they certainly do furiously object) when they are accused of believing in nothing, if they refuse to offer up their beliefs for examination and argument. But they will not deign to argue: they only dismiss. So their critics within the party must resort to violence. The only concessions to dissident opinion are made at the point of a gun: viz the conceding of a free vote on same-sex marriage, which was purchased with the implied threat of ministerial resignations, or the relegation of Lords reform when it looked like provoking open mutiny. But why should the party have to stage a riot in order to get its own leaders to pay attention to considered criticisms?

It is no good attributing all this to those infamous Constraints of Coalition. This leadership has had an aloof pig-headedness about it from its earliest days in opposition. A huge swath of the party (and of the commentariat) pleaded with Mr Osborne when he was shadow chancellor to get off the hook of his commitment to match Labour’s spending plans but – all together now – He Would Not Listen. So when the crash came in 2008, and everybody’s spending plans went down the plughole, the Tories were left stupidly mute. Had they been saying all along – as their critics had urged – that public spending was too high, they could have looked splendidly prescient and marched into the crisis with their heads held high.

But the greatest danger in refusing to engage with argument, as this column has pointed out before, is that you never get to test your position and perfect your case. This weakness – the inability to anticipate objections and pitfalls because you have not bothered to construct a rigorous defence – has cost the Tory leadership a great deal in these past dreadful weeks. Labour is now writing its own history of the Tory downfall: it was the cut in the 50p tax rate that began the avalanche, they claim, consigning the party to its old role as defender of the rich, blah blah. This is rubbish. The cut in the top tax rate had been heavily trailed and was already, as they say, factored in to the public response. It was the unexpected “little” stories – the granny and pasty taxes – that ran amok and did the damage. This might have been avoided if the Chancellor had presented his measures in the context of an argument which he had road-tested in the white heat of debate. Instead, he utterly lost control of the discourse.

So what is to be done? Well, as the rehabilitation programmes say, the first step to recovery is to admit that you have a problem.